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Repurposing Content Through Visual Reimagination

As any content marketer will tell you, diligent strategy execution and time can yield a treasure trove of promotional material for your use. That content creation, however, can take up a lot of bandwidth. It’s not easy to consistently turn out high quality blog posts, white papers, newsletters, emails, and more. But in a fast paced world of social sharing, there’s pressure to do exactly that. You have to stay fresh. You have to stay relevant. You have to stay hungry.

That doesn’t mean that you have to reinvent the wheel six times a day. As your library of existing content swells, it’s not only perfectly acceptable but absolutely advisable to find ways to recycle or repurpose that content for ongoing use.

There are a number of ways you can do this. Quora conversations can become blog posts. Webinars can become informative videos. Blog post series can become white papers. White papers, case studies, and blog posts can become ebooks.

This sort of tactic works. Taking information you already have and putting it into a new wrapper not only frees up some of that precious bandwidth, but allows you access to broader or distinct audiences through leveraging new mediums.

But there’s one type of repurposing that is frequently forgotten or ignored: design.

We’re living in a visual world, where images lead to greater content and social account engagement in addition to higher share rates and wider reach. Yet when the subject of repurposing content is broached, the talk usually revolves around how the existing content can be given what amounts to a light makeover. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it ignores the possibilities that arise when you take content and put it into a completely new visual format.

How can you do that?

1. Infographics — Infographics are shared at 3 times the rate of any other sort of content published online. That’s a lot of power in one image. And though we usually associate infographics with the organization of data, they can also be used to illustrate concepts involving process and composition. Somewhere in your existing content is a piece that begging to be translated to this format.

2. Quote Graphics — People love them some quotations, and they love sharing them. They don’t even need to be accurately reported or attributed to gain traction; there is an ocean of quote graphics out there “from” Marilyn Monroe if you’d like some examples. We wouldn’t encourage anything like that, but it makes total sense to transform some of the memorable or powerful lines from blog posts of days gone by into shareable quote graphics.

3. Cartoon Strips — People like to laugh. They like making other people laugh. They like folks who help them do both. So why not satisfy that itch while also showing off your smarts? Take a blog post on common mistakes in your industry, for instance, and commission illustrations to drive the point home in snarky fashion. It’ll help you stand out, and maybe snag some new audience members who might otherwise not have found you.

Have you tried other visual means of repurposing content? Tell us about it in the comments!